Reprocessing Historical Images, Looking for REALLY big challenges? Options

[Bob Shaw]

How about a super-res version of Twin Peaks?

I think it's been done...

Bob Shaw

[Phil Stooke]

Nice Epimetheus images, Ted. Did you notice that the middle one shows a nice broad valley running top to bottom in the lower half? It's faintly visible in the others too.

Phil

[tedstryk]

Nice Epimetheus images, Ted. Did you notice that the middle one shows a nice broad valley running top to bottom in the lower half?  It's faintly visible in the others too. 

Phil

Yes. I will say that the best of the images is the one on the right, which was created from a stack from the other images, with the portions of each image including the shadow not included. That valley actually confused me for a while (I thought it was the shadow!). Here is the composite image, but larger (the shadow images couldn't sustain enlargementt well, and were also beafed up using the stacked image on the right (that is why they don't look smeared).

[tedstryk]

How about a super-res version of Twin Peaks?

Here are close-ups of each peak. But yes, I have posted similar images before (although these two are new).



At my webpage,, you can view the rest of my still-in-progress Pathfinder collection.

[Steve G]

Bob, I did some detective work.  The only image which looks in the right direction is AS12-48-7101.  On ALSJ it's too small to help.  A really good scan of it might show the left-most (northern) footpad imprint.  If anyone out there is in a position to oblige us...

Phil

The best colour image of Surveyor 3 was from Al Bean's frame AS12-47-6949 that is posted at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Pete Conrad took a few frames at the beginning of EVA 1 but the focus is slightly off (set at 15 feet in error) and Al's was taken at the end of EVA 1 with the sun about 1 degree higher.

I've been browsing this site for months and this is the first time I've mustered the courage to participate in discussions.

I've been a space buff since I was a kid and you guys humble me.

[Steve G]

Since people liked the Surveyor 7 pic, here's another.  This is a raw scan, I haven't cleaned it up.  But the last image was very well known, and this one I can almost guarantee nobody has ever seen before.  Tantalizing, eh? 

This view looks at the same area as the last one, north of Surveyor 7 where a range of hills forms the horizon.  But the light is lunar evening instead of lunar morning in the other one.  A deep shadow falls into the Playa area.

[attachment=1347:attachment]

I JPG'd it rather heavily to make it postable at full size.  I have a full pan like this, except that glare from the sun blocks the view to the west.  The over-contrasty nature of the image was in the original print.  THis was scanned at USGS Flagstaff.  Thanks Adrienne!

PS if all goes as we think now, my Surveyor pan files will soon be on the web...

Phil

I spent pretty much all of yesterday browsing through this forum and am totally blown away with your efforts. I dusted off my old "Exploring Space with a Camera", one of the best books I've ever seen on early space photography. Here is a scan taken from the book on the Surveyor 6 landing site. After Surveyor 7, one of the more interesting surface panoramas as there is a ridge directly ahead.

[lyford]

Welcome to the board, SteveG!

[djellison]

Is the raw data for that stuff available anywhere?

This sort of thing - http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/p50b.jpg

Doug

[jrdahlman]

Back to the Mariner 4 pictures:

TR-32-884
"Mariner Mars 1964 Television Experiment:
Volume 2: Picture Element Matrices"

Does ANYBODY know where a copy even exists??

You'd think that living in the San Francisco area, a copy should be in easy reach. But neither UC Berkeley or ANY of the UC system has it in their libaries, and even mighty Stanford only has Volume 1. (Big deal--I've already downloaded that!) So much for expensive universities. While I'm sure the nearby Ames Research Center probably has one in their archives, they're certainly not going to let a non-professional man-off-the-street like me see it. So far it hasn't shown up on any of the Nasa sites, and Bob Andrepont told me he hasn't found it yet.

Anyway, the reason I'm asking is this: I am hereby (foolishly?) volunteering my services as data entry clerk, to type in all those endless numbers in the printouts. Then we can finally see what the 1964 digital pictures of Mars really looked like. I have one or two OCR programs I'd like to throw at them, but even if they don't work, I don't mind the typing if you don't mind me being slow. Besides, back in the 80's I used to patiently type in BASIC programs out of magazines--with pages of DATA statements--for my computer, so I don't mind that sort of thing.

If anybody actually has a copy, perhaps we could arrange emailing sending me scanned pages, maybe a few at a time?

John D.

[Phil Stooke]

I just noticed Doug's question about raw Surveyor data.

The Surveyor images were transmitted to earth, of course, but the archiving medium was film. The electronic data were kept for a while but almost certainly do not survive, let alone in any readable format. Film was the archive medium.

I have seen boxes of negatives, 80,000 of them, at LPI. That's as close as you get to raw data. I scanned some positive prints of individual images. Mostly my work has been with scans of photos of hand-made photomosaics. A long way from raw!

Incidentally, my long job of restoring Surveyor pans is coming to an end (thank the flying spaghetti monster). I must have been nuts to start it! I'm working on Surveyor 6 now. The only full pan I could find is post-hop with quite a high sun, so it's fairly bland but not too bad. But very messy. Every frame has reseaux and dust contamination to remove. I'll post a section when I have one done in a few days.

Phil

[edstrick]

TR-32-884
"Mariner Mars 1964 Television Experiment:
Volume 2: Picture Element Matrices"

"Does ANYBODY know where a copy even exists??"


Univ of Texas at Austin didn't have a copy, though it had all the rest of the volumes bound together <probably, I hope, still has> in the engineering library.

I'm 98% sure that the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston had a copy and presumably still does. I couldn't afford to xerox it at $0.10 a page for possible future use, and it's been on my wish list for 2 decades to see those images "reconstituted" properly

[djellison]

Crickey - this stuff needs SAVING - it's important. Perhaps TPS could be convinced to do some sort of rescue ops and go and hunt for all this old stuff. It's important.

Doug

[lyford]

Dumpster diving for science!

As one paleontologist wag put it (and I most assuredly misquote) "There are as many discoveries waiting to happen in the dusty drawers of museum collections as there are in the fossil beds..."

Though our remote sensing ability is exponentially better than in the past, a lot of these photos provide valuable historic data and preserve changes in time in weather patterns and such.

[djellison]

Yes - much like the ALH84001 story, they had it sat in archives for years before they paid it any real attention, not knowing what it actually was.

Doug

[tty]

Dumpster diving for science!

As one paleontologist wag put it (and I most assuredly misquote) "There are as many discoveries waiting to happen in the dusty drawers of museum collections as there are in the fossil beds..."

Though our remote sensing ability is exponentially better than in the past, a lot of these photos provide valuable historic data and preserve changes in time in weather patterns and such.

Interestingly the "intelligence community"e seem to be more aware of the value of old data than NASA. Apparently every image ever taken by the "Corona" recce satellites was carefully archived, and is available for research. Probably this is because the analysis of "before" and "after" images are of extreme importance in photographic reconaissance and you can never know in advance which places it may become important to have "before" data for.
If only NASA would understand this as well.

tty